his great folio volume in half a dozen different languages, he thought he knew a great deal more about the whole affair than was actually the case, for he mingled the Norse legend. with the Dighton Rock, and the Old Mill at Newport, and with other possible memorials of the Northmen in America -matters which have since turned out to be no memorials at all. The great volume of "Antiquitates Americanæ " contains no less than twelve separate engravings of the Dighton Rock, some of them so unlike one another that it seems impossible that they can have been taken from the same inscription. Out of some of them Dr. Rafn found no difficulty in deciphering the name of Thorfinn and the figures CXXXI., being the number of Thorwald's party. Dr. T. A. Webb, then secretary of the Rhode Island Historical Society, supplied also half a dozen other inscriptions from rocks in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which are duly figured in the great folio; and another member of the Danish Historical Society, taking Dr. Webb's statements as a basis, expanded them with what seems like deliberate ingenuity, but was more likely simple blundering. Dr. Webb stated, for instance, that there were "in the western part of our country numerous and extensive mounds, similar to the tumuli that are so often met with in Scandinavia, Russia, and Tartary, also the remains of fortifications, etc." Mr. Beamish, with the usual vague notion of Europeans as to American geography, first reads "county" for "country," and then assigns all these vast remains to "the western part of the county of Bristol, in the State of Massachusetts." And the same writer, with still bolder enterprise, carrying his imaginary traces of the Northmen into South America, gives a report of a huge column discovered near Bahia, in Brazil, bearing a colossal figure with the hand pointing to the Northpole. It was more than suspected from certain inscriptions, according to Mr. Beamish, that this also bore a Scandinavian origin. Such was the eager temper of that period that it is

a wonder they did not attribute a Scandinavian origin to Trenton Falls or the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky.

For some reason or other the Old Mill at Newport did not play a prominent part in the great volume of Professor Rafn, but he published a pamphlet at Copenhagen in 1841, under the name of "Americas Opdagelse," containing a briefer account of the discoveries, and this contains no less than seven fullpage engravings of the Newport structure, all intended to prove its Norse origin. But all these fancies are now pretty thoroughly swept

away. The Norse origin of the Old Mill has found no scientific supporters since Rev. C. T. Brooks and Dr. Palfrey showed that there was just such a mill at Chesterton, England, the very region from which Governor Benedict Arnold came, who, in his will, made in 1678, spoke of it as "my stone-built windmill," and who undoubtedly copied its structure from the building remembered from his boyhood. A mere glance at two recent photographs of the two buildings will be enough to settle the question for most readers.

And in a much similar way the Norse origin claimed for the Dighton Rock has been set aside. So long as men believed with Dr. Webb that "nowhere throughout our widespread domain is a single instance of their [the Indians] having recorded their deeds or history on stone," it was quite natural to look to some unknown race for the origin of this single inscription. But now when the volumes of Western exploration are full of inscriptions whose Indian origin is undoubted, this view has fallen wholly into disuse. If

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we put side by side a representation of the Dighton Rock as it now appears, and one of the Indian inscriptions tran

scribed in New Mexico by Lieutenant Simpson, we can hardly doubt that the two had essentially a common origin. There are the same crudely executed and elongated human figures, and the same series of crosses, easily interpreted, when horizontal, into letters and figures.

Another rock, supposed by some to be a memorial of the It lies Northmen, has lately been described and figured. upon the shore, on the farm of Dr. C. H. R. Doringh, within the township of Bristol, Rhode Island. Mr. W. J. Miller, of Bristol, a well-known antiquarian, gives a representation of it in his little book entitled "The Wampanoag Indians." The

rock is of graywacke, and is ten and a half by six and a half feet in length, and twenty-one inches thick. It is only bare at low tide, and the surface is much worn by the waves. There is inscribed on it a boat, with a series of lines and angles, the whole being claimed as an inscription, and the theory of Mr. Miller being that it was carved by some sailor left in charge of a boat and awaiting his companions. Had the account been printed in 1840, it would have furnished the whole Danish Society of Antiquarians with a great argument, and even now it well deserves attention. Yet whoever will compare the outline of the boat with the Norse ship already figured will see that they have little in common; and almost

any New Mexican inscription will show in different places very much the same idle combination of lines and angles.

All these supposed Norse remains being ruled out of the question, we must draw our whole evidence from the Norse

tled in Greenland, but visited lands beyond Greenland, which lands could only have been a part of the continent of North America. This Mr. Bancroft himself concedes as probable. It is true that this rests on the sagas alone, and that these were simply oral traditions, written down perhaps two centuries after the events, while the oldest existing manuscripts are dated two centuries later still. Most of the early history of Northern Europe, however, and of England itself, rests upon very similar authority; and there is no reason to set this kind of testimony aside merely because it

We can argue nothing from their rate of sailing, for we do not know how often they sailed all night, and how often they followed the usual Norse method of anchoring at dark. Little weight is now attached to the alleged astronomical cal